Tripped Up, Ripped Up, Whipped Up

Life's got a funny way of sending you a message, doesn't it? The clues are there, all the time, and all you have to do to put them all together is to spend a little time meditating on them.

Apropos of nothing, I mean, because this doesn't have anything consciously to do with me (there's a surprise, huh?), but life will sometimes let you know exactly the path you need to take, and it takes a fairly astute person to "get it" early enough on to really take advantage of it.

As an actor, I am trained to examine and delve into scripts and psyches, and to explore the subtext to the script and situation the playwright presents. Curiously, playwrights use life examples as scripts. Life has a subtext, too.

This issue came to a head for me this weekend, when I watched an interview with Julianne Moore regarding her new movie, "Hannibal". She was talking about the work she did as an actress to get into the role, and to promote her character thru the script ("grow her character", I guess, would be the better phrase). I won't bore you with a discussion of acting technique, but suffice it to say that an actor will do yeoman work to create an action score for his character to reveal his or her development in the context of the story.

The interviewer, Jeffrey Lyons, asked her a very simple question: "Since movies are shot out of sequence, how do you keep track of your character's development at any one point?"

I don't know if she realized how much of her (non-)craft she revealed in her answer, but I can bet about a thousand actors sat up and took notice when she said, "Oh, I leave that up to the director!"

In a nutshell, Moore reveals why she will likely never win an Academy Award, even if those are based mostly on the popularity of the person up for consideration. This was one of those moments that one might look back on later and say, "Maybe I should have paid more attention?"

We all have these "moments of important inattention", as I like to term it, moments of stupefying ignorance so great that we look back at them in embarassment. I know one or two people personally who are having precisely this type of experience now, altho modesty (and the probability of a major civil lawsuit if I revealed them) prevents me from telling the circumstances.

Some are public and therefore doubly disgraceful; many are private but become public only after the door shuts behind us; some, mercifully, never see the light of day.

For example, aside from the few rabid rightwing assholes, who didn't believe for *at least* a second that Bill Clinton was telling the truth when he waggled his finger at us, and said "I never had sex with that woman"? We were ready to cut him a slice-o-slack, figuring that even if he had a rotten reputation regarding women, if he was this vehement, then maybe he was wrongfully accused.

Do you think he ever looked back at that press conference and thought later there was a better way of handling all this, that he was in total denial over the stained Gap dress? I do. It was a moment of important inattention.

We all slip up in these moments, too. Dubbya was caught on an open mike calling Adam Clymer of The New York Times an "asshole", and it was compounded by Dick Cheney adding "big time". Think that won't come back to haunt him at some point? It already did, because suddenly, some of the these things he'd been lying, I mean, telling us about started turning out to be false: his drinking problem being under control, for example, or his family values coming under attack once it was revealed he hid a drunk driving record for 25 years to save his daughters from embarassment.

It seems to me we have these moments of important inattention whenever we get boastful or self-important; whenever we lie or delude ourselves or others; finally, when we think we've worked some magic spell to protect ourselves.

We deny the reality of the world, and that reality comes back to bite us in the ass, hard.

There really is only one preventive measure you can take to protect yourself. It's easy, but hard, and requires only that you control the one thing in the world you possibly can control: yourself.

Live in truth. Live in truth despite the fact that there will be plenty of times when it will be easier to deny to others or to yourself what that truth is. Live in truth, because keeping track of the lies (what a tangled web we weave!) becomes almost impossible, but the truth can always be checked out.

Live in truth knowing full well there will be times when those who live in lies around you will be "getting over" with their lies. Understand that karma catches up with them, too, and they'll pay a price in the world for the "getting over" part. Live in truth knowing full well there are people around you who would lie to you at the drop of a hat. Live in truth, and these lies are harmless to you, because you'll see them coming from a mile away. Live in truth, because this protection makes you more powerful than anybody else you know, except it will make you precisely as powerful as anyone who also lives in truth.

Live in truth, and anything you've done from that truth can't be used against you. I wrote a story about ten years ago that I submitted to Purr a few years later because I wanted to share that part of me that can be very ugly. I'm not ashamed of who I am, and this part of me, as small as it is, is still part of what makes "me".

Well, recently, this story was excerpted and published in a newsgroup, with some rather intentionally disgraceful comments, tut-tutting me as some wild-eyed loon or worse.

My truth? That part of me that created that story was healed by the writing, and I moved on from a painful period to learn something about myself.

Turns out the people who did the bulk of the tut-tutting had a record of stalking his lovers, in one case, and a degraded history of cheap and sleazy sex for money in another.

A moment of important inattention.